![]() ![]() Dominate two or more, and you can drive market share. In my experience, there are three areas of business excellence, and it is necessary to dominate at least one of them to remain relevant. Macy’s is struggling, apparel retailers by the dozens are closing, Blockbuster Video is gone, and the list goes on. What happened? Even Walmart, with its current retail penetration, can’t boast of market share like that! Yet not a day goes by without a retail analyst speculating on when Sears will file for bankruptcy or go away all together. At one time, over 90 percent of the American buying public shop-ped at Sears, either at stores or through its catalogue. The poster child for the case I will make is Sears. More importantly, it may foreshadow the fate of a few of today’s food retailers. And, if we take a look at some once-successful general merchandisers, there may be some hard lessons to be learned. Some songs become earworms more often than others do, but earworms are contagious, so we won’t list those catchy tunes here.A song from back in the day, by Stealers Wheel, was called “Stuck in the Middle with You.” While the lyrics of the song seemingly have nothing to do with today’s retail environment, it could serve as the theme song for the drama playing out among many current retailers. Given that most earworms are short 15 to 30-second snippets of a song that repeats over and over, you might be able to break the cycle simply by satisfying your brain’s desire to hear the entire song. If those strategies aren’t enough, then this next one is sure to work! Some researchers believe that earworms happen because of the Zeigarnik Effect, which causes your brain to dwell on an incomplete thought or process. They say that it is much harder to remember words or songs while you’re chewing.
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